Smoked Chicken Wings

I did quite a bit of cooking over the weekend so I'll have a few things to share this week. First up is the appetizer for Saturday's cook. I've been wanting to do some chicken wings for a while. I was trying to think up a recipe when I saw this post at Jason's BBQ Blog. His wings looked fantastic, so I thought I would give them a try. I had to deviate from his recipe some so I'll post what I did here.

The rub:

• 1 part kosher salt.
• 2 parts turbinado sugar
  
• Jason used yellow sugar...I'm going to show my ignorance and say that I don't know what that is.
• 1 part paprika
• 1 part garlic powder
• 1 part onion powder
• 1 part dry mustard
  
• Jason used ground black mustard...again, not sure what that is.
  
• ½ part coriander
  
• Jason used cardomom, but it was outragously expensive, so I substitued.
  

The sauce:

• 2 cups smoked tomato halves
• Two good sized tomatos, smoked on the Chargriller for about an hour at 250ish. I don't think I smoked them as long as Jason did.
  
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup dried dates.
  
• Jason used fresh dates (I think), but I could find any.
  
• 1 clove garlic smashed
• 1 large red onion, quartered.
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 juice from ½ of a lemon
• ½ tablespoon rosemary
• ½ tablespoon thyme
• 1 teaspoon coriander
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon cayenne

Put all of the sauce ingredients into a blender or food processor and liquify it.

I sprinkled the rub very liberally over the wings and let them sit for 15 or 20 minutes. Jason used a BBQ wok for his wings but I used a couple disposable aluminum pans. I put one layer of wings per pan and smoked for a total of about 2 hours or so. You can rip one open when you think it's close and take a look to make sure they are done. The fat really came out of the wings, so I drained the fat twice during the cook. Like Jason, I put the sauce on about a half an hour before the cook was over.

The sauce ended up kind of gooey, so I fired up the kettle and charred up the outside of about half the wings....you could see them on the left of the pic. The ones that I put on the kettle definitely had a slightly different taste, but they were equally good. These wings will definitely be made many more times. They were fantastic.


Update: make sure you check out my update on this recipe in a more recent post.